Yiddish is not dead. As a matter of fact, it is blossoming, according to experts, who will gather at a convention devoted to the centuries-old east-European Jewish dialect at Jerusalem's Hebrew University next week.
"Yiddish was considered a matter for jokes until recently,” said Prof. Yechiel Szeintuch, head of the Yiddish Chair at the school and one of the organizers of the event. “However, in the last decade we are witnessing a renewed interest in the Yiddish language and culture among young and old non-Hareidis, and the demand for learning the language has grown.” Almost 40 lecturers from Israel and abroad will participate in the convention and 550 people from around the world have expressed interest in attending so far.
“Yiddish was at its peak a hundred years ago,” Prof. Szeintuch said. “Between the two world wars, 1,700 Yiddish newspapers were published in Poland alone, in 90 towns and cities.” The Holocaust was a severe blow to Yiddish because millions of Yiddish speakers perished, but “Yiddish did not die with them,” he added.
Studies show that there are two to three million Yiddish speakers in the world today. Experts say that it is not expected to die out anytime in the next century. “A language's fate is like the fate of the nation,” observed Prof. Eli Lederhendler, Chairman of the Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the university and another organizer of the conference. “One way of following a language's history is to follow demographic, linguistic and cultural changes in the body of the Jewish people and that is the purpose of the present conference.”
The Hebrew University experts noted that the Internet plays a central role in the dissemination of Yiddish nowadays, offering lovers and students of the language a way of finding a rich cultural world and contacting other Yiddish fans. Yiddish has undergone changes, too: the establishment of Israel led to an influx of Hebrew terms, and the computer revolution has brought new words into the language, including Internetz, Web art (website), Blitzpost (e-mail) and Shleptop (laptop).
